This invention addresses the problem of providing for the collection and disposal of bodily fluid, especially waste liquids, other than with conventional bathroom, collection or sanitary facilities.
There are many situations in which a person finds himself or herself with a need to urinate but without any conventional bathroom facilities readily available. Telephone and electrical cable splicers and installers may work in underground manholes and tunnels and have no access to bathroom facilities without leaving the job site and traveling to a public restroom. Similarly, workers in the field such as telephone and electrical workers are often working at a location remote from bathroom facilities and also must stop work and travel to distant remote facilities several times a day to relieve themselves. In the past it has often been the practice that a person working in a remote or confined location would have no choice but to find a reasonably private location at the job site and urinate there. Such is a highly unsatisfactory situation, however, since it is in violation of many health and environmental regulations, particularly in more recent years when such regulations have become more prevalent.
Similarly, pilots and passengers in many types of private and military planes do not have regular bathroom facilities available to them during long flights. The problem is particularly acute in the case of military pilots who must fly long missions in extremely cramped surroundings and yet must be sufficiently alert to be able to respond instantly to hostile action.
The need for a convenient manner of safely and securely collecting and retaining waste liquids for disposal is also apparent in other situations. Those who suffer from motion sickness in vehicles such as cars and airplanes need a satisfactory container to collect and dispose of vomit which results from their motion sickness.
In a different setting, medical personnel must often dispose of significant quantities of patients' blood in surgery, trauma centers or emergency rooms where patients may be bleeding profusely. The current practice of using open containers to collect the blood has proven quite unsatisfactory.
Further, there are circumstances which do not actually involve bodily "waste" but where bodily fluid collection is performed, such as where one may wish to collect a bodily fluid for analysis or examination, as with collection of a urine or blood specimen.
There have been some previous devices which attempted to deal with the problem. The military have, for instance, been aware of the problem with respect to flight crews and the Navy and Air Force have provided flyers with a type of urine collection bag containing a sponge-like material intended to entrap the liquid. It has been found, however, that leakage of significant amounts of urine from such bags is very common, particularly when the aircraft perform aerial maneuvers.
There have also been a number of products disclosed for use by private pilots, campers, medical patients and the like, which utilized various types of containers which are intended to be sealed after use. Typical are the devices shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,458,640; 3,403,715 and 4,581,763, which all involve a variety of bag and closure structures designed solely to confine urine and other body fluids in liquid form, until such contained liquids could be disposed of. As with the military bags, there products have exhibited the problems of leakage, odor, susceptibility to damage (with attendant leakage) and difficulty of storage pending disposal.
There have also been devices which incorporate means (other than the sponges mentioned above) which attempt to sequester liquid urine, such as a product previously sold commercially under the registered trademark "RESTOP." The latter product incorporates an absorbant material contained within a soluble pouch inside a conventional bag. However, the pouch takes a long time to dissolve when contacted by the urine, so that the absorbant material does not rapidly become effective. For some time after use, therefore, the "RESTOP" product is susceptible to spillage of the liquid urine, since the outer bag does not contain any closure structure capable of physical retention of the liquid urine.
There is therefore clearly a need for a convenient and practical fluid collection and containment bag which may be easily used even in a confined environment, which provides secure and complete absorption and retention of the fluids even under external forces which would otherwise tend to disperse the liquid and which can be conveniently and safely disposed of.